


Because It Was the Scorpion's Nature

by orphan_account



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Family, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-05
Packaged: 2017-11-03 01:50:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma had always been good at lying. So why, when it mattered most, did it suddenly become so difficult?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Because It Was the Scorpion's Nature

**Author's Note:**

> Shameless Mary Margaret/Emma friendship fluff. Because I desperately needed some after Hat Trick.

Emma had always been fairly good at lying.  
Well okay, she was selling herself short. She was great at it. Wonderful, really. She could even consider it her second super power. She’d started lying before she’d learned how to say the word.  
So why, when it mattered most, did it suddenly become so difficult? Why did her breath hitch, the tears pooling on her bottom eyelid threaten to spill down her cheeks, and why could she feel each painful beat of her heart, a battering ram against bone doors?  
She wasn’t exactly out of practice (it had been her job for six years before she moved to Storybrooke those months ago), and she’d lied in all sorts of situations.  
She’d lied about little things; inconsequential details that no one really cared about anyway.  
 _I hate that movie. I’m not one for reading. I’ve never seen him around._  
She’d lied about big things.  
 _It was just a stomach bug._  
She’d lied to protect others.  
 _He wasn’t the one that ate the cookie, ma’am. She was just comparing answers._  
She’d lied to save her own skin.  
 _I didn’t steal the ring. I’ve never seen that gun before._  
She’d lied to strangers.  
 _My name is Edith. You can drop me off here, my place isn’t far._  
She’d lied to herself.  
 _I’m fine. Everything is going to be okay. I don’t need them._  
And even before had she lied to save her own life.  
 _I’ve got a gun—you come any closer I’ll blow your head off._  
And not once had she choked like that, the words clogging her throat like they were made of white bread and peanut butter. So, once again (because she was a scorpion and it was her nature), Emma lied. She told herself it was in a panic for Mary Margaret, she told herself that Jefferson (crazy-ass-off-his-rocker-stalking-son-of-a-bitch Jefferson) had gotten her thinking about Henry with his story about the neighbors’ kid, and that she hadn’t slept at all that week worrying over the case. She shut her lie detector off against her own defenses and happily scooted the lie to the back of her brain, where she hoped it would curl up and allow itself to be forgotten.  
It didn’t, though. It just festered.  
No matter how she fought—tooth and nail, words and whip—it did not stop bothering her. Lying had become the one and only constant in her life, and now in the backwards small-town that was Storybrooke, that was being ripped from her too.  
She wanted to ask Mary Margaret about it, but she knew the woman would ask what it was she had told him (in the most innocent way, of course, so that Emma couldn’t be angry even if she tried. She was only trying to help), and there was no way Emma was telling her. So she kept it bottled up for a few more days.  
It was four days past the arraignment when Emma finally figured it out. She hadn’t slept that night—again, and had fallen asleep on Mary Margaret’s files. The said woman had forced her to the couch (not physically, of course, but Emma reckoned she could move boulders with that stare) because Emma had refused to leave her alone in the cold cell of the police station, what with her framer still not caught and Jefferson on the loose. So with a pillow and blanket wriggled through metal bars, the watchful gaze of her friend, and the station safely under lock and key (the blinds closed, this time) Emma drifted into a shallow, restless sleep.  
She didn’t open her eyes when she awoke, preferring instead to stick with the childhood theory of “if I can’t see it, it can’t see me”. As if by keeping her eyelids firmly in place she could somehow will Mary Margaret not to see the way her hands shook and clung to the pillow, the sweat on her forehead, the tears that she hoped didn’t stain the couch. As if she could will her not to hear the whimpers and hiccups long enough for Emma to calm them, repeating her steady mantra of _she’sokayshe’sokayshe’sokay_ and _he’sgonehe’sgonehe’sgone_.  
When the cell door creaked on rusty hinges, swinging enough to barely tap the stopper on the floor, Emma glued her lips and set her jaw firmly in place (it still trembled, she griped), trying to pretend that for all intents and purposes she was in fact asleep.  
She hadn’t taken that key back for a reason. If Mary Margaret wanted to run, Emma wouldn’t be the one to stop her.  
So she was surprised when she didn’t hear anything over the shaky intake of her own breath; no shoes padding over the tiled floor, no keys jangled, no doors unlocked and opened, no files taken and hidden away. Instead, a hand found its way in her hair, fingers curling through the ringlets and drifting along her head.  
“Shh, it’s just a nightmare sweetheart.”  
Emma’s heart thumped, but she didn’t respond—couldn’t. Mary Margaret obviously thought she was still asleep, or she wouldn’t have risked coming out of her cell to comfort her (or comforting her in the first place, with the spikes on all the walls Emma had built up around her over the years). So Emma lay there, trying not to feel intrusive as Mary Margaret banished her tears with a stroke of her thumb, soothed the worry off her forehead, and ran the back of her fingers over her jaw, murmuring so lowly that Emma couldn’t make out the words.  
After a few minutes Mary Margaret moved away, and she couldn’t help but whimper at the loss of contact. At the surface she scolded herself; said that if she was too weak to open her eyes and open her heart then she wasn’t deserving of the attention, said that this wasn’t her mother and it was foolish to treat the situation as such. But Emma had never had someone to wipe her tears away, to come to her when she had a nightmare. And it was that part, that same scared little girl, who elated at the return of the stroke in her hair, of the fingers that barely ghosted over her cheeks.  
And it was that same little girl who recognized the mumbled whisperings of the lullaby that she once learned in the night from an etching on a music box, who felt the warmness in her core at the sound of the words, ones that she had never been allowed to claim as her own.  
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word…”  
She tilted her head into the touch, if only a bit, and she could hear the smile come into Mary Margaret’s voice.  
“Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”  
And it was then that Emma realized; not once had her ability to lie been compromised. That the excuses she had made for her actions had not been wrong for the reasons she’d been thinking, but for the fact they existed at all.  
Because Emma had always been able to lie.  
It was the truth she couldn’t handle.  
 _If what you say is true, that woman in the other room is my mother. And I want to believe that more than anything in the world._


End file.
